2024-07-23 13:23:45
A dense and busy city, Paris is often criticized for the pollution of its streets, real or artificial. The Olympic Games lead the community to adapt itself, including to face the most unwanted guests, the rats.
In this weapon, first of all these agents are on bicycles, responsible for weaving between pedestrians near the Olympic sites, where garbage trucks cannot access.
In the same areas, they are supported by some 150 representatives who are divided into “Olympic teams”, timed according to the schedules of the events, to collect waste when “guests come and go”, specified Antoine Guillou , assistant priest at Paris City Hall.
Added to this is an envelope of 4 million euros for additional service providers and overtime for agents who work elsewhere in the capital.
This is the program of the host city of the Olympic Games (July 26 – August 11), which is preparing to receive 15 million visitors in the next two weeks.
The Organizing Committee (Cojo) manages the interior of the competition grounds. But keeping their areas clean, the 26 fan areas and regular tourist spots represent a big challenge for the city hall and its 7,000 representatives who have to maintain reception and cleanliness.
– Prevent loading –
Without specific recruitment, the call for volunteers – support donations of up to 1,900 euros – makes it possible to form these “Olympic teams” without reducing the ranks of local teams or harming the start of the building year- book, in the middle of the Paralympic Games (August 28 – September 8).
However, door-to-door collection is not available in many areas of the capital for three days: Friday (opening ceremony) and August 3 and 4 (cycling races).
Some areas will also have admission on August 10 and 11 and September 8 (long races), and this Thursday (cycling time trial).
Antoine Guillou warned: “You must not remove the cage from the house these days” because “it will hinder the race or raise security questions”.
And the risk of ruining the image of the city, is often damaged by photos and videos of tourists expressing anger at trash cans overflowing or lying on the ground.
The March 2023 garbage strike, with its peak of 10,000 tons of uncollected garbage, didn’t help matters.
Antoine Guillou knows: “It can always happen that waste accumulates in one place.
– The mouse is the lead –
Their misery, the rats, which earned Mayor Anne Hidalgo a lot of ridicule, is another picture issue.
Confronted with the collective hysteria brought about by the subject, the health assistant Anne-Claire Boux wants to say a clear word: “No one can be motivated to exterminate rats in Paris, then it is useful for treating muscles water is that they stand there.
In parks and gardens, the city hall has established closed boxes to keep rodents out.
In addition to filling holes and installing mesh to prevent nesting, 70 representatives of the Public Health and Hygiene Service (Smash) also set 1,000 mechanical traps.
“As a resort, when we are truly infested areas”, they will have traps that contain the biocide, recognizable by their black box shape, indicates Ms. Boux.
“All Olympic sites and ceremonial areas have been the subject of a diagnosis”, in particular to “the place of boxes which do not attract rats”, and deep cleaning operations, adds the designated environmental expert .
For the river in the Seine, the organizers are planning a green carpet for the access of athletes to the river, to avoid any risk of leptospirosis, “zoonosis which is spread by cutting”, points out Anne-Claire Boux.
Everywhere, Cojo and the town hall will convey a “basic” message, remembers Antoine Guillou: “put your waste in the trash”.
The Smash is ready to intervene in the event that it “returns to a place where you start to see a lot of rats,” said Ms. Boux.
“We have organized our teams so that in the event of impotence” as well as with food waste on the ground, “we can intervene in a very reactive way”, adds Antoine Guillou.
It was not enough to convince the opponent Geoffroy Boulard, who attacked the “silence” of the city hall in the face of the possible “infestation of thousands of undesirables” – rats, bedbugs and tiger mosquitoes – which caused “great concern among professionals in the complex.
The city hall should have taken “serious action, especially in terms of rodent control”, said Mayor LR of the 17th district.
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